Meet Me in the Morning is a new café just off Camden Street. It is so new that when I was there decaf coffee wasn’t an option. Neither was herbal tea. I was assured, however, that non-caffeine drinkers will have some options very soon. They’re still getting supplies in.
I was offered, in the most polite way possible, either of the two coffee bean options they do have, complete with a description about why they are distinct and delicious. I myself was too polite to interrupt this monologue knowing I would just order a tea.
The space is light and full of light wood and wild flowers. I loved the wood-topped tables. I want one for my own home. It’s comfortable and minimal. The food looks simple and delicious, and yes, don’t worry, there is avocado on this menu. Eggs too. We are still in Dublin, after all. Salads, soups, etc all make an appearance. All the food is local and prepared on the day.
MMITM is a very nice spot just off the main drag to sit and have a bite or sip some (caffeinated. For now) warm drinks. I’d say it will be worth popping in a few times to see how the menu changes throughout the summer. Not to mention trying all the different delicious coffee beans.
This week is Italian Week! I did not set out to do that, it’s totally subconscious. I’m reading the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan books at the moment and obviously it’s having an effect.
Dolce Sicily occupies the location once inhabited by Staple Foods, before their move to Grattan Street. Specifically, you’ll find it in Crow Bar in Temple Bar, and much of the furniture and decor is the same as when it was Staple Foods.
The issue with this space is the fact that it smells a bit like a nightclub. It’s got that “nightclub in the daytime” stench that no amount of Italian food can hide. Staple Foods had the same issue.
The majority of the menu belongs to paninis and salads. Perfect quick lunch fair. The paninis are slightly outside of the “normal” parma ham and mozzarella and include items like smoked kippers and egg, or sun-dried tomato and anchovy pesto. There are a variety of breads to choose from in case you are anti-ciabatta. However, if you are really anti-ciabatta there are other non-Italian delis and cafés to visit in Dublin, so maybe try those first?
The cake list is impressive and many of the offerings sit proudly on the bar near the coffee maker. They also sit next to the beer taps. Again, the Pistachio Nutella cake might be more appetizing if you weren’t also forced to wonder if you might like a pint of Tiger beer.
The bar vibe did not stop many people from enjoying lunch, coffees and cakes. In fact, the majority of the clientele was, in fact, Italian. That is always a good sign. The staff is also all Italian. The food is tasty. I hope that all of those big pluses keep Dolce Sicily alive despite the stale beer smell.
In New York City getting a slice of pizza is as easy as hailing a cab: stick your arm out and it happens. In Dublin, buying pizza one cheesy slice at a time is not the norm.
DeFontaine’s, on the south side of Capel Street Bridge, is a New York-style pizza joint. It even smells authentic NYC in there. There are two giant ovens that bake the pies as well as heat up the slices as they are ordered. There are a variety of toppings to choose from: the classics, cheese and pepperoni, the new classics, Hawaiian and broccoli, and a few extras, extra cheese and peppers, onions and mushrooms, as well as spinach and ricotta.
I popped in on my way to a birthday party across the river–VERY hungry–a few weeks ago. I got two giant slices. I ate them both quite happily, thank you very much, and didn’t feel ill afterwards.
The cheese slice actually did taste exactly like a New York slice (when you walk into a pizza joint in NYC and order “a slice” it will always be a classic cheese unless you ask for different). It was warm and gooey and perfect. I also ordered the spinach and ricotta because, you know, eat your greens. This too was tasty. I kept the bottle of chili oil close at hand.
The clientele was mostly single dudes. I mean, I don’t know if they are “single”, I didn’t ask them out. They were just on their own. I was on my own too, the only lady in there for most of the time I ate. Only one other girl came in, ordered, and took her slice to go.
Though it smells and looks quite like a New York pizza joint, that doesn’t make a person want to sit around and enjoy a leisurely meal there. It’s a grab ‘n’ go kind of place. But hey, that’s proper authentic too. And, if your a single lady, who knows? Maybe all of those dudes are actually single.
A few of my hipper (not hipSter, hipper) friends had mentioned Fia to me weeks ago. One of them knows the chef/owner. The other of them just knows things. I was cycling back from an appointment the other morning and I realized I could go exactly in the direction of Fia on my way home.
Fia is not exactly in central Dublin striking distance. I like this. It sits in a no-man’s-land on Rathgar Road between Rathmines and Rathgar. When I lived in Dublin in 2001-02 as a Trinity student, there was a shop on the corner where Fia is now. I would swing into the shop on my way up to visit friends in Rathgar and stock up on peanut M&Ms. This corner has some happy food memories for me.
Instead of peanut M&Ms, though, I treated myself to a delicious flat white and some sour dough toast with butter and homemade marmalade. It was an “elevenses” meal, as I was far too early for lunch and had already eaten my breakfast. The lunches looked great, though, as they started to parade out while I got ready to leave.
It’s a simple, small menu, but they’ve picked items that work. The Peas on toast looked especially inviting for a spring afternoon. Good eggs, great cheese and free water packed with mint and lemons: what more does any sweet café need?
The space is simple and light. The bathroom (important for pregnant women of Dublin!) is clean and spacious, and the clientele is mostly middle-aged locals. The staff are upbeat and on it, the prices are fair, and the Peas on Toast will be my next order.
The South Circular Road between Portobello and Cork Street is really stepping up it’s café and restaurant game. It’s long been home to classic go-tos BiBi’s, Nelly’s, Sister Sadie, and Noshington. Little Bird has recently joined the happy party, located just up from Leonard’s Corner.
Little Bird’s “something different” is the fact that it is a yoga studio as well as a coffee shop. One does not have to do yoga to enjoy the café or drink a coffee to get a free handstand workshop. The two are one, but function independently. Something for everyone! But if you happen to be a coffee drinking yogi, it doesn’t get better than this.
Little Bird has a generous front garden/patio area that faces south. I suspect this will be the scene of many a brunch time rumble on warm days this summer. The other day, even in the weak spring sunshine, five people were sitting out there. I didn’t opt to sit outside, but I was thrilled to find a tiny puppy curled up under a table on a blanket next to my inside table. Yoga, puppies, and good coffee!? They know exactly what is happening in my head!
It isn’t a huge space so if you don’t like puppies, a) who are you? and b) you won’t be able to get too far away from your neighbors. It’s well designed, though, so it feels very comfortable. My favorite detail is the massive glass jugs of flavored water. One day was mint and cucumber or basil. Another day, instead of the basil was thyme and lemon. Hydration Station Taste Sensation. That’s not what it’s called, but it should be.
They serve porridge and scones and toast for breakfast. I had the porridge that arrived with a very generous amount of homemade berry compote and cinnamon on top. Super way to start my day.
I sat there long enough to watch what the early lunchers ordered from the simple, straight forward menu. Open faced sandwiches, a big salad and a soup. Lots of rocket, pesto and sundried tomato options.
The coffee is very good and there is a selection of Wall and Keogh loose leaf teas to choose from. There are also protein balls and various baked treats to keep your blood sugar up pre or post stretching.
I have yet to try a yoga class there, but I have heard the studio is lovely. Any excuse to have a cozy breakfast in a cute neighborhood sun trap, though. Not to mention discovering what new flavors they will create in their tap water!
Lunch at Fumbally is an obvious weekday go to not only for me but for most of the people I know in Dublin. Plenty of people I don’t know frequent Fumbally as well. Sometimes there is an Irish celebrity of some form or other. I have never heard anyone say that they were not a fan of Fumbally.
Now Fumbally is serving dinner on Wednesday evenings from 7-9. The menu has two options: meat or vegetarian. The same dish is made two ways. I love the fact that I don’t really have to choose. I also love that I know what will be placed in front of me will more than likely be delicious.
Main Event
This Wednesday was Korean night. The option was a huge rice bowl filled with kimchi, scallions, spicy peanuts, and either crispy tofu or pork belly. Nothing is more comforting than being handed a big bowl of steaming, spicy, sticky rice when it’s chilly outside. The whole place smelled of pickles and spice.
There were sides available as well. Various pickled vegetables, peas and more spicy peanuts and seeds, and (slightly off theme) burned butter with sourdough bread. We made the very easy choice of ordering one of each.
I opted for the vegetarian option as we were eating late and pork belly seemed a bridge to far if I wanted a relaxed dream land adventure. I had to stop myself from eating to quickly. Luckily the food arrived all at once, which saved me from eating ALL of the burned butter and bread. It is hard to be polite around Fumbally’s homemade burned butter.
There was nothing that arrived to our table that wasn’t a taste sensation. I sipped on the in-house turmeric, ginger and lemon kombucha and there is wine available too.
We ordered the dessert because didn’t want to be the people who left one untasted item on the menu. It’s not a big menu! Might as well try it all! So we did. We were delighted with ourselves and our incredible peanut butter mousse, chocolate soil and a dark chocolate crisp. Fluffy, nutty, rich, chocolaty goodness that no Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup could hold a flame to.
Fumbally’s vast interior dresses up in coziness for the evening quite successfully. Lots of candles, low lighting and all the mismatched furniture make it feel like you are at a friend’s house. The service is a bit like that too: attentive but not at all fussy.
There are some fantastic places to dine in Dublin and Fumbally is certainly at the top of that list. For day or night.
What’s Dining Out if It’s Not Got Erotic Chopstick Art?
Rustic Stone got a re-vamp last year and along with new décor a new restaurant was placed above the original. The new restaurant is Taste, a Dylan McGrath fusion experience. The menu tells you which taste sensation to be ready for: sweet, salty, sour, etc with each dish. That’s the gimmick, I guess, but I don’t remember paying attention to those “taste menus” at all as we ordered. Taste is highly influenced by Japanese cuisine, but there are elements from South America and other Asian locations as well we’re told. These days focusing on one cuisine seems amateur to most celebrity chefs. “Fusion” sits across the room batting her eyelashes, and you’d better start mixing your materials.
I went to Taste the other night with my godmother, her partner, my husband and my appetite. We climbed up and up (passing a hip bar with young, attractive, pre Patrick’s Day revelers getting into their cocktails) to the L-shaped restaurant. There is a sushi bar along one wall, then seats and tables along the others. It’s a nice space; exposed brick, naked light bulbs, plenty of copper. It glows.
We all opted to order dishes from the “small dishes” and “small warm dishes” item lists as well as a few rolls of sushi to share. Though it was unintentional, we enjoyed a full pescatarian dinner. Eating as either a pescatarian or a vegetarian would be both simple and delicious here.
The dishes came out like little works of art in pretty bowls or arranged nicely on little plates. The artichoke hearts arrived over smoking hot coals. This is fun if entirely unnecessary. It also takes up a lot of elbow room.
Not Lambchops, Artichokes.
We especially enjoyed the “blowtorched” scallops (which we ordered only because the word blowtorched was in the title) and the sweet chili prawns with a tempura crunch. The highlight was certainly the king crab sushi roll. It was warm, salty, sweet and sticky. There was a siracha mayo for dipping and some fresh ginger for palate cleansing. We ordered another one of those (one just wasn’t enough) and one of the shrimp rolls as well. The shrimp was almost as good as the crab. Almost. I didn’t even reach for my camera for these guys. You’ll have to just go meet them for yourselves.
Blowtorched Scallops & Sweet Chili Prawns
I would go back just for the king crab sushi roll, but the other taste treats were delightful. The service let the side down. Yet again, Dublin restaurant service puts the overall experience the wrong side of extraordinary. We arrived very early and had the full attention of about three servers for about fifteen minutes. As more tables arrived, we were less and less important to anyone. It took far too long to order a second glasses of wine and to ask for the bill. You’d think they would be on it because two of the staff members running the show had blue tooth ear pieces in. It looked impressive, but maybe they weren’t on?
The food, the ambience, the wine, etc, is all great at Taste. If the service had also been great, it would have been a truly excellent dinner.
When we sat down at Bastible the other night none of us could actually say what a Bastible is. Can you? Well, here you go: a Bastible is “a flat bottomed cast iron pot used for baking largely in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.” Now that we know, we are all better people, right?
I have been known to frequent restaurants strictly because they have fun bathrooms. There is a restaurant in the West Village in NYC that I brought many people to and went back to repeatedly for two reasons: 1, $10 two course lunch menu and 2, bathrooms that were hilarious and terrifying all at once. I would bring friends from out of town, then they would then bring new friends when they would come back a year later. The bathrooms kept Peep in our repertoir for years. I would still go back today. I won’t tell you exactly what the bathrooms at Peep are like, go see for yourself.
The bathrooms at Bastible are excellent too. Their use of brushed concrete, communal trough sink and rope toilet roll holders was enough to have our table talking for at least ten minutes. That was handy because we were there for over three hours and needed to fill our time at the table talking about something.
We talked about the food when we had it, which probably totaled all of 30 minutes of the three hours we spent in the place.
Freebie treat.
The food is worth talking about. It’s excellent. If it had been served in a timely manner it would have been better. We were all very hungry for each course, then ate too quickly, then all felt hungry thirty minutes after.
Delicious Beetroot Starter
There were some classy freebies, and I love a classy freebie. We had gorgeous giant radishes to dip in a smoked cod roe hummus-like sauce. These freebies were standard for all dining and not because we were being made to wait for our food.
Venison Main
I was told we would be asked politely to leave by 8.45 when I booked, but our food had not arrived by 8.30. Then we were allowed to sit with nothing to eat or drink for almost fifteen minutes before we got the bill. It got exciting when the fire alarm started going off because of some frying going on in the open kitchen. We probably should have just started on a second dinner at that stage. Would they have noticed if we just walked out?
Offending Extractor Fan/Kitchen
For a restaurant that has been open long enough to have worked out service kinks, and to have made sure their extraction fan works. I had very high expectations. The food lived up to them. The overall experience did not. For the cost of the experience, all expectations should have been met.
At Bow Lane on Saturday morning, I turned into a Restaurant Jerk. I became the guy who makes a fuss about food, or argues over what can and cannot be served. I am never that guy. If my meal comes out and is missing an item promised to me on the menu, I won’t say anything. If my burger isn’t cooked perfectly, I let it slide. On Saturday, I ordered the Truffle Egg Toast, and this is how I morphed into Restaurant Jerk:
Me: I’d like the Truffle Egg Toast, please, but may I have the egg well cooked?
Server: Oh, um, I actually don’t know if you can. It’s a poached egg.
Me: Right, and I would just like it to be cooked a bit longer. I’m not supposed to eat runny yolks at the moment.*
Server: Well, you see, the egg is cooked in the toast, it’s all put under the grill, and if we try to cook it longer the toast will burn.
This was my moment to say, “ok, well, let me have a look at something else, then, give me a second. What might you recommend?”
But instead, I said, “is there really no way you could cook the egg first and then put it in the toast?”
Server: You see, they crack the egg in the bread and cook it all together. That’s just how it’s done.
I’m thinking “let it go, it’s fine, I’m bummed, but let it go,” and I’m saying,
Me: And there is no other way to do it?
Server: I’m so sorry. But the Eggs Benedict is really good and we can definitely poach your eggs longer?
Me: Let me see . . . . Um . . .
At this stage my husband and my friend are thinking “Annie! Decide! Who cares! Oh man, we’re sitting with the Restaurant Jerk.”
Me: Ok, fine. I’ll have the Eggs Benedict I guess. With the eggs well cooked. Please.
You know what? The Eggs Benedict was pretty darn tasty. There was plenty of slow cooked salty ham, wilted spinach, crispy sourdough bread in place of a muffin and just the right amount of hollandaise sauce. My eggs were cooked perfectly.
The Eggs Benedict
C ordered the Eggs, Greens and Grains which was colorful on arrival and colorful in the mouth. The freekeh, a grain I hadn’t heard of before, was cooked with a kind of pesto and there were plenty of roast vegetables. It was also hilarious to watch C struggle with the full roast leek on this plate.
Eggs, Grains, and Greens
Our friend had the pancakes and I’m glad she did. Someone had to provide desert. The ‘cakes themselves live somewhere between a crepe and an American pancake and were stacked tall before being drowned in a maple caramel sauce and some cream for good measure. There were also bananas.
PANCAKES!
Our coffees were tasty, the room was dark and cosy. Though the brunch is delicious, I did feel that Bow Lane is somewhere you want to be in the evening. When the sun is shining outside it’s hard to sit in a dimmed room with dark wood and leather. However, I like to imagine myself surrounded by that dark wood and leather on a rainy night with one of the many cocktails on the list.
There is a bar menu and a restaurant menu for evening. Some items overlap. The space is large, so even though Bow Lane is quite popular, you should definitely try to squeeze in. I will, because you can’t judge a place just on its brunch, right?
*I am currently pregnant and have been told to avoid runny yolks, but like all pregnancy advice, there is always some wiggle room and frankly, I probably could have eaten the Truffle Egg Toast. The whole thing just became competitive for me. I turned into a Restaurant Jerk.
It is nice to walk into Industry on Drury Street and not have to leave 10-15 minutes later feeling angry that I simply cannot afford to pay over 50 euro for some nesting wire baskets. Happily for me, the food at the café is affordable and delicious.
The menu is like an upmarket Blazing Salads (Industry’s neighbor) with the added carnivore offerings of meat or fish. There were seven salad options the other day and two protein options. Salad options included a beet and goats cheese, c0uscous, grilled sweet potato, grilled broccoli, green lentil, carrot, and green beans with sugar snaps. Protein options were cold chicken breasts smothered in an herb yogurt sauce and cold grilled salmon.
I had the chicken and two green salads. An extra broad bean salad was brought out when I was about halfway through my meal which I thought was unfair. It looked like a mountain of creamy orange bean goodness.
There are four vegetable juices to choose from, all the coffee confections you could hope for and plenty of flourless dessert treats. So if you just want a snack or a quick coffee, you’re taken care of. Whatever your choice, you’ll be hard pressed to choose badly. The food is fresh and tasty, the coffee is good and according to an overheard conversation the cookies are “excellent”.
It’s nice to sit in Industry and watch the people walk by. Even though I cannot afford the candles, blankets, or hip leather backpacks they sell, sitting amongst those treasures, eating yummy food is some consolation. If you’ve got a cape or giant scarf that can be slung around like a cape, you’ll be even closer to fitting in with your surroundings.
The Full Irish American Breakfast 